As a former member of the state’s Health Policy Commission, it was with great sadness that I read the misinformed Oct. 12 op-ed by Boston Children’s Hospital board committee member Mike Widmer (“Watchdog overreaches on Children’s Hospital expansion’’).

Widmer’s main point is that the commission overreached in deciding to submit its cost growth analysis to the Department of Public Health, the agency charged with reviewing the most expensive hospital building and expansion project the state has ever reviewed. The commission found that this project, which would add 71 beds to a shrinking Massachusetts pediatric inpatient market, will likely increase commercial health care spending in the state and could destabilize the market for pediatric care. The range of that increase overlaps with the one that Partners HealthCare’s acquisition of Hallmark Health System would have produced — a transaction that was ultimately stopped when a state court judge reading Health Policy Commission findings decided that the proposed acquisition would be too expensive for premium payers to bear.

Shocking to me is Widmer’s claim that the commission is wrongly inserting itself in the process over Children’s. After all, this is “the independent state watchdog agency’’ created by our 2012 cost-containment law to do exactly what it did: review key market transactions and analyze their impacts with a particular focus on cost and future spending challenges for our residents.

For Widmer to wish that the commission just remain silent in the face of a looming $140 million of additional expense at Children’s that we consumers may be asked to cover is a shameful request that represents an attack on working people and their wages.

Dr. Paul Hattis

Newton

The writer is an associate professor at Tufts University Medical School and a member of the health care cost-containment strategy team with the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization. His views here are his own.